The Chemist

CHAPTER 3

Tonight, her name was Alex.

She’d needed to put a little distance between herself and DC, and she’d ended up in a small motel just north of Philadelphia. It was one of half a dozen that lined the interstate on the way out of the city. It would take any tracker a while to search all of them, even if he first somehow narrowed down her position to this part of town. She’d left no trail to even get a hunter to Pennsylvania. Regardless, she’d be sleeping in the bathtub tonight as usual.

There was no table in the small room, so she had all the files laid out on the bed. Just looking at them exhausted her. It had not been a simple matter of having Carston FedEx them somewhere.

The information was ready, Carston had told her. He’d been hopeful that she would meet with him, and he would have brought the files with him if he’d been expecting her. She insisted on hard copies, and he agreed. She gave him the delivery instructions.

The difficulty was breaking the connection on both ends.

For example, she couldn’t just have Carston dump the files into a trash can and hire someone to pick them up for her – it was too easy for people to keep an eye on that trash can. The watchers would see the person who picked the files up and then follow that person. That person could take the files to a separate drop spot before she came near them, but the eyes would already be there. Somewhere along the line, the package had to be out of the observers’ sight long enough for her to perform a complex little shell game.

So Carston had, as instructed, left a box for her at the front desk of the Brayscott Hotel. Mr. Green was ready. He thought Carston was a friend who had stolen back those family heirlooms from the violent ex, who was surely following him. Mr. Green had given her the code so she could remotely watch the hotel’s video surveillance feed from an Internet café miles away. Just because she hadn’t seen people following Carston didn’t mean they weren’t there, but he appeared to simply deliver the box and walk away. The manager did a good job of following all her instructions, most likely because he knew she was watching. The box went into the service elevator and down to the laundry, where it was transferred to a maid’s cart, delivered to her room, and then put into her inconspicuous black suitcase by the bike messenger to whom she’d given the key card and five hundred dollars. The bike messenger had taken a circuitous route, following the instructions she’d given him over a cheap prepaid phone that she’d already disposed of, and eventually dropped the box with a confused salesperson at the copy store across the street from the café.

Hopefully, the watchers were still back at the hotel, waiting for her to walk through the front door. Probably they were smarter, but even if there were ten watchers, there wouldn’t have been enough to follow every stranger who walked out of the hotel. If one had attached himself to her messenger, he would have had a hard time keeping up. She could only cross her fingers that no one was watching now.

She’d had to move fast. That next hour was the most dangerous part of her plan.

Of course, she’d known there would be some kind of tracking device hidden in the materials. She’d told Carston she would scan for a trick like this, but perhaps he’d guessed that she didn’t have the tech to do that. As quickly as possible, she made a set of colored duplicates. It took fifteen minutes, much too long. The duplicates went into the suitcase, and the originals into a paper bag that the girl at the counter gave her. She left the box in the garbage there.

The clock was really against her now. She’d climbed in a cab and had the driver head toward a rougher part of DC while she looked for the first place that would give her the privacy she needed. She didn’t have time to be picky, and she ended up having the cabbie wait for her at the end of an unsavory alley. It was the kind of behavior he would definitely remember, but there was no help for it. They could be watching her already. She hurried to the bottom of the dead-end alley – what a place to be caught! – stepped behind a dumpster, and cleared a spot on the broken asphalt with her foot.

The sound of movement behind her made her jump and spin around, her hand on the thick black belt at her waist, her fingers automatically seeking the thin syringe hidden farthest to the left.

Across the alley, a dazed-looking man on a bed of cardboard and rags was watching her with a mesmerized expression, but he said nothing and made no move to either leave or approach. She didn’t have time to think about what he would see. Keeping the homeless man in her peripheral vision, she turned her focus to the bag of original documents. She pulled her lemon-shaped squeeze bottle out of her handbag and squirted it into the paper bag. The smell of gasoline saturated the air around her. The man’s expression didn’t change. Then she lit the match.

She watched the burn carefully, the fire extinguisher in her hands now in case the flames started to spread. The homeless man seemed bored by this part. He turned his back to her.

She waited until every scrap was ash before she doused the flame. She didn’t know what was in the files yet, but it would assuredly be very sensitive. She had never worked on a project that wasn’t. She rubbed the toe of her shoe across the black and gray powder, grinding it into the pavement. There wasn’t a fragment left, she was sure. She tossed a five to the man on the cardboard before she ran back to the cab.

From there it was a series of cabs, two rides on the Metro, and a few blocks on foot. She couldn’t be sure that she’d lost them. She could only do her best and be ready. Another cab landed her in Alexandria, where she rented a third car on a third brand-new credit card.

And now she was outside of Philly in this cheap hotel room, a heavily perfumed deodorizer warring with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, staring at the neat stacks of paper laid out on the bed.

The subject’s name was Daniel Nebecker Beach.

He was twenty-nine. Fair-skinned, tall, medium build, medium ash-brown hair with longish waves – the length surprised her, for some reason, perhaps because she so often dealt with military men. Hazel eyes. He was born in Alexandria to Alan Geoffrey Beach and Tina Anne Beach née Nebecker. One sibling, Kevin, eighteen months older. His family had lived in Maryland for most of his childhood, except for a brief stretch in Richmond, Virginia, where he had gone to high school for two years. Daniel had attended Towson University and majored in secondary education with a minor in English. The year after graduation, he’d lost both parents in a car accident. The driver that had hit them was killed as well; his blood alcohol concentration had been.21. Five months after the funeral, Daniel’s brother was convicted on drug charges – manufacturing methamphetamine and dealing to minors – and sent to serve a nine-year sentence with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Daniel had married a year later, then gotten a divorce two years after that; the ex had remarried almost as soon as the rushed divorce was final, and she’d produced a child with the new husband – a lawyer – six months after the wedding. Not terribly hard to read between the lines on that one. During that same year, the brother died in a prison fight. A very long rough patch.

Daniel currently taught history and English at a high school in what most people would consider the wrong part of DC. He also coached girls’ volleyball and oversaw the student council. He’d won Teacher of the Year – a student-voted award – twice in a row. For the past three years, since the divorce, Daniel had spent his summers working with Habitat for Humanity, first in Hidalgo, Mexico, then in El Minya, Egypt. The third summer, he’d split his time between the two.

No pictures of the deceased parents or brother. There was one of the ex – a formal wedding portrait of the two of them together. She was dark-haired and striking, the focal point of the photograph. He seemed almost like an afterthought behind her, though his wide grin was more genuine than the expression on her carefully arranged features.

Alex would have liked the file to be more filled out, but she knew that, with her detail-oriented nature, she sometimes expected too much of less obsessive analysts.

On the surface, Daniel was totally clean. Decent family (the self-destructive cycle that had led to the brother’s death was easy enough to understand in light of the parents’ crash). The victim in the divorce (not uncommon for the spouse of a crusading teacher to realize that the salary would not support a lavish lifestyle). Favorite of the underprivileged kids. Altruist in his free time.

The file didn’t state what had first caught the government’s attention, but once they’d scratched that surface, the dark came seeping out.

It seemed to have begun in Mexico. They hadn’t been watching him then, so it was only the bank numbers that told the story. The forensic accountants had put together a well-documented history. First, his own bank balance, which had sat at just a couple of hundred dollars after the divorce, was suddenly plus ten grand. And then a few weeks later, another ten. By the end of the summer, it was sixty total. He went back to work in the States, and the sixty grand disappeared. Maybe a down payment for a condo, a fancy car? No, nothing visible, nothing on the record. The next year, while he was in Egypt, there were no sudden increases in his finances. Had it been gambling? An inheritance?

That alone wasn’t enough to catch anyone’s attention without some kind of a tip-off, but she couldn’t locate the catalyst in the file. Even with an explicit tip, someone in the accounting department had to have been putting in overtime or else was very, very bored, because despite the lack of urgency, the financial analyst had hunted down that original sixty thousand dollars like a bloodhound with his nose to the ground. Eventually he found it – in a new bank account in the Caymans. Along with another hundred thousand.

At this point, Daniel’s name was put on a list. Not a CIA or FBI or NSA list – an IRS list. Not even a high-priority list at that. His name wasn’t very near the top; he was just someone to look into.

She wondered for a moment how his brother’s death had affected him. It looked like he had logged some fairly consistent visits to the brother, his only family left. Wife runs out, brother dies. Seemed like a decent recipe for pushing someone deeper into his bad choices.

The money kept growing, and it was in no way consistent with what a drug mule or even a dealer might make. Neither job was so well compensated.

Then the money started to move and became harder to trace, but it added up to about ten million dollars in Daniel Beach’s name bouncing around from the Caribbean to Switzerland to China and back again. Maybe he was a front, with someone using his name to hide assets, but as a general rule, the bad guys didn’t like to put those kinds of funds into the hands of unwitting schoolteachers.

What could he be doing to earn it?

Of course they were watching his associations at this point, and it paid off quickly. Someone named Enrique de la Fuentes showed up in a grainy black-and-white photo taken by the security camera in the parking lot of Daniel Beach’s motel in Mexico City.

She’d been out of the game for a few years, and this name didn’t mean anything to her. Even if she had still been with the department, it probably wouldn’t have been a part of her usual caseload. She had done some occasional work on the cartel problem, but drugs never got the red lights flashing and the sirens screaming the way potential wars and terrorism did.

De la Fuentes was a drug lord, and drug lords – even the scrappy, upwardly mobile kind – rarely got any attention from her department. Generally the U.S. government didn’t much care if drug lords killed each other, and usually those drug wars had very little impact on the life of an average American citizen. Drug dealers didn’t want to kill their customers. That wasn’t good for business.

She had never in all her years, even with the high-security clearance that was a necessary part of her job, heard of a drug lord with an interest in weapons of mass destruction. Of course, if there was a profit to be made, you couldn’t count anyone out.

Profiting from the sale of was quite a different kettle from unleashing, though.

De la Fuentes had acquired a medium-size Colombian outfit in a hostile (to put it mildly) takeover in the mid-1990s and then made several attempts to establish a base of operations just south of the Arizona border. Each time, he’d been repelled by the nearby cartel that straddled the border between Texas and Mexico. He’d become impatient and started looking for more and more unorthodox methods to dispose of his enemies. And then he’d found an ally.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth.

This was a name she knew – knew and loathed. Being attacked from the outside was horrific enough. She felt the deepest revulsion for the kind of person who was born to the freedom and privilege of a democratic nation and then used that very privilege and freedom to attack its source.

This domestic-terrorist ring had several names. The department called them the Serpent, thanks to a tattoo that one of their late chiefs had possessed – and the line from King Lear. She’d been instrumental in shutting down a few of their larger conspiracies, but the one they’d accomplished still gave her the occasional nightmare. The file didn’t say who had made the first contact, only that an accord had been reached. If de la Fuentes did his part, he would receive enough money, men, and arms to take out the larger cartel. And the terrorists would get what they wanted – destabilization of the American nation, horror, destruction, and all the press they’d ever dreamed of.

It was bad.

Because what was better for destabilization than a deadly, laboratory-created influenza virus? Especially one you could control.

She could tell when the narrative shifted from the analysts’ point of view to the spies’. Much clearer pictures.

The spies were calling it TCX-1 (no notation in the files on what the letters stood for, and even with her rather specialized background in medicine, she had no idea). The government was aware that the TCX-1 superflu existed, but they thought they’d eradicated it during a black ops raid in North Africa. The lab was destroyed, the responsible parties apprehended (and executed, for the most part). TCX-1 hadn’t been heard of again.

Until it showed up in Mexico a few months ago, along with a supply of the lifesaving vaccine, already incorporated into a new designer drug.

She was starting to get a headache, the kind that was extremely localized. It was a hot needle stabbing directly behind her left eye. She’d slept a few hours after checking in and before diving into the files, but it hadn’t been enough. She made the short walk to her toiletry bag beside the sink, grabbed four Motrin, and swallowed them dry. She realized two seconds later that her stomach was totally empty, and the Motrin would no doubt burn a hole through the bottom as soon as it hit. In her bag she always had a stash of protein bars, and she quickly gnawed her way through one as she returned to her reading.

The terrorists knew they were always being watched, so what they’d given de la Fuentes was information. De la Fuentes would have to provide the manpower – preferably innocuous, unremarkable manpower.

Enter the schoolteacher.

From what the best analytical minds could piece together, Daniel Beach, all-around good guy, had gone to Egypt and acquired TCX-1 for a hungry, unstable drug lord. And he was clearly still part of the plot. From the evidence available, it appeared he would be the one dispersing TCX-1 on American soil.

The inhalable designer drug containing the vaccine was already in circulation; valued customers would never be in danger, and perhaps this was a second part of the plot. Even the most unstable drug lord had to be pragmatic where money was concerned. So maybe noncustomers would learn just where salvation waited – and that would create a whole new desperate clientele. Daniel Beach was no doubt immune by now. It wasn’t a difficult job to circulate the virus; it would be as simple as wiping an infected swab across a surface that was regularly handled – a doorknob, a countertop, a keyboard. The virus was engineered to spread like the proverbial wildfire – he wouldn’t even need to expose that many people. Just a few in Los Angeles, a few in Phoenix, a few in Albuquerque, a few in San Antonio. Daniel already had hotel reservations in each of these cities. He was due to embark on his deadly journey – ostensibly to visit more Habitat for Humanity sites as a preparation for next fall’s school field trip – in three weeks.

The Serpent and de la Fuentes were attempting to orchestrate the most debilitating attack that had ever been perpetrated on American soil. And if it was true that de la Fuentes already had the weaponized virus and the vaccine, they had an excellent chance of success.

Carston hadn’t been kidding. What she’d originally thought had been an act to play to her sympathies now appeared to be an amazing demonstration of self-control. Of all the potential disasters that had crossed her desk – back when she’d had a desk – this was one of the very worst, and she’d seen some bad things. There had even been one other biological weapon with the potential to do this kind of damage, but that one had never made it out of the lab. This was a feasible plan already in progress. And it wasn’t hundreds of thousands of people dying they were talking about here – it would be closer to a million, maybe more, before the CDC could get control of the situation. Carston had known she would discover that fact. He’d deliberately downplayed the disaster so that it would sound more realistic. Sometimes the truth was worse than fiction.

The stakes were higher than she’d expected. This knowledge made it harder for her to justify her own little low-stakes game. Was the tight focus on saving her own life even defensible in the face of this kind of horror? She’d held a hard line in her conversation with Carston, but if there was any chance this story was more than a trap, did she have any choice but to try to stop it?

If Daniel Beach disappeared, de la Fuentes would know someone was onto him. Odds were, he would act sooner than he’d planned, ahead of schedule. Daniel had to talk, and he had to talk quickly. And then he had to go back to regular life, be seen, and keep the megalomaniac drug lord calm until the good guys could take him out.

In the beginning, it was standard operating procedure for Alex’s subjects to be released into the wild for a short time. This was a major part of her specialty; Alex was the best at retrieving information without damaging the subject. (Before Alex, Barnaby had been the best and only man for the job.) The CIA, the NSA, and most similar government sections had their own teams for interrogating subjects who were slated for disposal after the information was acquired. Over time, as she proved more successful than even the best of the other teams, Alex had gotten a lot busier. Though the other sections would rather have stayed insular, kept the information with their own people, the results spoke for themselves.

She sighed and refocused on the now. Eleven pictures of Daniel Beach lay in a row across the pillows at the head of the bed. It was hard to reconcile the two sides of the coin. In the early pictures he looked like a Boy Scout, his softly waving hair somehow projecting innocence and pure intentions. But though it was obviously the same face in the spies’ photos, everything was different. The hair was always hidden under hoods or ball caps (one of her own frequent disguises); the posture was more aggressive; the expressions were cold and professional. She’d worked on professionals. It took time. Possibly more than one weekend. She looked at the two matching but contradictory faces again and wondered briefly if Daniel had an actual psychiatric disorder or if it was a progression she was looking at, and the innocent no longer existed at all.

Not that it mattered – yet.

The headache felt like it was searing a hole through the inside of her eyeball. She knew it wasn’t the hours of reading that had caused it. No, the decision looming in front of her was the source of the pain.

She gathered up all the files and stuffed them into a suitcase. The decimation of the population of the American Southwest would have to take a backseat for a few hours.

She was in a different car than she’d started out with that morning. Before checking into the motel, she’d returned the rental in Baltimore, then taken a cab to York, Pennsylvania. The cabbie dropped her a few minutes’ walk from the house where a man surnamed Stubbins was selling his three-year-old Tercel, as advertised on Craigslist. She’d paid cash and used the name Cory Howard, then driven to Philly in her new ride. It was a trail that could be followed, but it would be very hard to do.

She drove several miles away from her motel, then chose a little dive that seemed to be doing brisk business. That was desirable for two reasons. One, she would be less memorable in a crowd. Two, the food was probably edible.

The dining area was packed, so she ate at the small bar. The wall behind the bar was mirrored; she could watch the door and front windows without turning around. It was a good perch. She had a greasy burger, onion rings, and a chocolate malt. All were delicious. While she ate, she turned off her brain. She’d gotten pretty good at that over the last nine years; she could compartmentalize almost anything. And while she focused on the food and watched the people around her, the headache subsided to a dull throb. Over the course of the meal, the Motrin finally won and the pain dissolved completely. She ordered a piece of pie for dessert – pecan – though she was completely stuffed and could only pick at it. She was stalling. Once the meal was over, she’d have to make a decision.

The headache was waiting for her in the car, as she’d known it would be, though it was not as sharp as before. She drove randomly down the quiet residential streets, where anyone following her would be obvious. The little suburb was dark and empty. After a few minutes she wandered closer toward the city.

There were still two columns of possibilities in her head.

The first column, that Carston had been lying in order to lure her to her death, was beginning to seem more and more unlikely. Still, she had to stay alert. This whole story could be fiction. All the evidence and coordinating departments and separate analysts with their differing writing styles and the photographs from around the world – it could be a very detailed, elaborate setup. Not a foolproof one, either, since they had no way of knowing she wouldn’t just walk away from it.

But why would Carston have all this info prepared if he’d hoped to get her to a prearranged meeting? They could have killed her easily there without all this window dressing. A ream of blank paper was all you would need if you expected your mark’s brains to be on the pavement before she could open the briefcase. How quickly could this kind of thing be thrown together? She’d given him no time to manufacture it on the spot with her early arrival. Who was Daniel Beach in this scenario? One of their own? Or an unsuspecting civilian Photoshopped into the exotic scenes? They had to know she would be able to verify some of this information.

They’d offered her a plan of action in the final file. In five days’ time, with or without her, they would pick him up during his regular Saturday-morning run. No one would miss him until school began again Monday. If anyone did happen to look for him, it might appear that he’d taken a little holiday. If she agreed to help, she would have two days to get the information they needed, then she would be free to go. They hoped she would consent to keep in some form of contact. An emergency e-mail address, a social network site, the classifieds even.

If she didn’t agree to the job, they would do their best without her. But trying to leave the informant physically unmarked would be slow… too slow. Failure was hard to contemplate.

She almost salivated at the thought of all the goodies waiting for her back at the lab. Things she could never get her hands on out here in the real world. Her DNA sequencer and polymerase chain reactor. The already fabricated antibodies she could stuff her pockets with if the invitation was on the up-and-up. Of course, if Carston was for real, she wouldn’t need to steal those things anymore.

She tried to imagine sleeping in a bed again. Not carrying a pharmacy’s worth of toxins on her body at all times. Using the same name every day. Making contact with other human beings in a way that left nobody dead.

Don’t count on it, she told herself. Don’t let it go to your head and impair your judgment. Don’t let hope make you stupid.

As pleasant as some of her imaginings were, she hit a wall when she tried to visualize the steps she would need to take to make them happen. It was impossible to see herself walking back through the shiny steel doors into the place where Barnaby had died screaming. Her mind totally refused to construct the image.

The lives of a million people were a heavy weight, but still an abstract idea in many ways. She didn’t feel like anything could push her hard enough to get her through those doors.

She would have to go around them, so to speak.

Only five days.

She had so much work to do.